99 Fun Facts About Food Trivia for Kids

Which of these is the main ingredient in ketchup?

Tomatoes only joined ketchup in the early 1800s; before that, British cooks made their ketchups from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies.

Which insects make honey?

Bees turn watery flower nectar into honey by fanning it with their wings until most of the water has evaporated, then seal each cell of the comb with a wax cap.

Which spicy sausage is sliced into thin red rounds as a favourite topping on American pizzas?

Pepperoni is an American creation, unknown in Italy, where the similar word 'peperoni' means bell peppers, so ordering it there gets you a pizza covered in vegetables.

Granny Smith, Gala and Fuji are all varieties of which fruit?

Apples: the Granny Smith is named after Maria Ann Smith, who is said to have found the first seedling in 1868 beside a creek on her farm near Sydney, sprung from leftover crab-apples.

Which fruit is the main ingredient in guacamole?

Avocado is mashed with salt and usually lime juice, and the lime is there for more than flavour: its acid slows the reaction with air that turns cut avocado brown.

Sushi is a traditional dish from which country?

Japan's sushi grew out of an old way of keeping fish from spoiling by packing it in salted, fermenting rice; at first the rice was thrown away and only the fish was eaten.

Which vegetable is famous for making your eyes water when you chop it?

Onion: slicing breaks its cells and sets off a reaction that releases a stinging gas; in 2008 scientists in New Zealand switched off the gene behind it and grew onions that cause no tears.

Tree sap is boiled down to make which sweet topping for pancakes?

Maple syrup starts as watery sap that is only about 2 to 3 per cent sugar, so dozens of litres have to be boiled down to make a single litre of syrup.

Which vegetable is used to make French fries?

Potatoes cut into strips make the crispest fries when they are fried twice: a first, cooler bath of oil cooks them through, and a second, hotter one browns the outside.

A raisin is which fruit after it has been dried?

A grape dried in the sun or in an oven becomes a raisin, and the word itself is simply the Old French for grape; a dried plum, by the way, is a prune.

Vanilla comes from which kind of flower?

An orchid: each vanilla flower opens for only about a day, so growers pollinate every one by hand, using a method worked out in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion.

Tacos are a traditional food from which country?

Mexico's tacos al pastor were shaped by Lebanese immigrants, who brought spit-roasted shawarma with them; their children swapped the lamb for pork and added a chilli marinade.

Where does a pineapple grow?

On a low, leafy plant about as tall as a child: each plant normally bears one pineapple, which is really many small fruits from separate flowers fused together into one.

Hummus is a dip made mainly from which food?

Chickpeas give the dip its name as well as its body: hummus is simply the Arabic word for chickpeas, and the full Arabic name means chickpeas with tahini.

Which grain has kernels that burst into a fluffy white snack when heated?

Popcorn is a special variety of corn kernel. Heat turns the moisture inside each kernel to steam until it pops open.

Peanuts are unusual because their pods ripen in what place?

Underground: the flower stalk bends down and pushes the young pod into the soil, a trick botanists call geocarpy, which is why peanuts are dug up rather than picked.

Botanically speaking, a banana counts as which kind of fruit?

Botanically a banana is a berry: a fleshy fruit that develops from a single flower's ovary with the seeds inside the pulp. The banana plant itself is a giant herb, not a tree.

The tiny specks on the outside of which fruit are each a separate little fruit with its own seed?

Strawberry: each speck is an achene, a tiny dry fruit holding a single seed, and the juicy red part is really the swollen tip of the flower stalk.

Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by John C. Wharton and a partner who worked in which job?

A dentist, William Morrison, built the electric spinning machine with confectioner John C. Wharton, and in 1921 another dentist, Joseph Lascaux, patented a rival machine and gave the treat the name cotton candy.

Cotton candy was sold at the 1904 St. Louis exposition under what name, still used in Australia?

Fairy Floss was its makers' name for it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where they sold 68,655 boxes at 25 cents each; Americans only began calling it cotton candy in the 1920s.

Which English nobleman gave his name to a filling served between two slices of bread?

The Earl of Sandwich: John Montagu, the 4th Earl, held the title in the 1700s and reputedly ate meat between bread so he could stay at the card table. The title comes from Sandwich in Kent.

What makes the famous holes in a wheel of Swiss cheese?

Gas made by bacteria fills the holes, and in 2015 Swiss researchers found the bubbles start around tiny specks of hay dust in the milk, which is why cleaner modern milking was making the holes shrink.

Watermelon belongs to the same plant family as which of these?

Pumpkin: both are gourds, a family that also takes in squashes and melons, which is why a watermelon plant sprawls along the ground just as a pumpkin patch does.

Butter is made by churning which ingredient until its fat clumps together?

Cream is churned until the membranes around its fat globules break and the fat clumps together into butter. The watery liquid left behind is buttermilk.

The Italian word 'spaghetti' means what?

Little strings: spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, from 'spago', Italian for string or cord. In 1957 the BBC fooled many viewers with an April Fools' film of Swiss farmers picking spaghetti from trees.

Carrots are packed with beta-carotene, which an enzyme in the small intestine converts into which vitamin?

Vitamin A helps eyes work in dim light, and in World War II British propaganda stretched that into a tale that carrots let pilots see in the dark, when their real help was radar.

The first carrots farmed in Persia about 1,000 years ago were usually which colours?

Purple or yellow were the colours of the first farmed carrots; the orange kind we know today was only developed centuries later, by growers in the Netherlands.

Yeast makes bread dough rise by turning the sugars in the dough into bubbles of which gas?

Carbon dioxide from the yeast feeding on sugars gets trapped by stretchy gluten, and the same gas puts the fizz in a soda.

A dill pickle starts life as which vegetable before it is soaked in brine or vinegar?

A cucumber left in salty water long enough turns sour all by itself, as bacteria living on its skin ferment it; in Britain a small pickled one is called a gherkin.

One egg from which bird holds about as much as two dozen hen's eggs?

The ostrich lays the largest egg of any living bird, around 1.4 kg, yet for a bird of her size it is surprisingly small: only a few per cent of the mother's own weight.

Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Britain were once carved from which vegetable?

The legend of Stingy Jack has him wandering the Earth with a glowing coal inside a hollowed-out turnip.

Marzipan, the sweet paste used to make little candy fruits, is made mostly from sugar and which nut?

Almonds ground with sugar make marzipan; each December, Geneva marks its 1602 victory over an invading army by smashing a chocolate cauldron filled with marzipan vegetables.

Rice, the food eaten by billions of people every day, is actually the seed of what kind of plant?

A grass: wheat, oats and barley are grasses too, which makes grass the most important plant family on any dinner table.

Farmers flood their cranberry bogs at harvest time because ripe cranberries do what in the water?

Float is what harvested cranberries do, so they are corralled into a corner of the flooded bed and pumped out, which is why harvest photos look like red lakes.

The chicle that General Santa Anna hoped would replace rubber ended up as the first modern what?

Chewing gum: inventor Thomas Adams could not turn the sap into usable rubber, so in 1871 he began selling it as something to chew instead.

Which vegetable does the cartoon sailor Popeye eat to become super strong?

Spinach was not part of the act at first: Popeye joined a newspaper comic strip in 1929 and only began eating it for strength in 1931, before the cartoons made squeezing open a can his trademark.

Tofu is made by pressing the curds of milk made from which bean?

Soybeans are soaked, ground and boiled into soy milk, which is curdled and pressed into tofu. Benjamin Franklin wrote home from London in 1770 about this Chinese 'cheese' and posted a friend some of the beans.

Cheddar cheese is named after a village in which country?

England: Cheddar is a village in Somerset, and caves in nearby Cheddar Gorge kept a steady cool temperature, perfect for ageing the cheese.

The spice cinnamon comes from which part of a tree?

The inner bark is peeled off in long strips that curl into tubes as they dry, which is why cinnamon sticks look like little scrolls.

A mushroom is not a vegetable, so what kind of living thing is it?

A fungus: the mushroom you eat is just the fruiting body, while most of the organism is a web of threads called mycelium hidden in the soil or wood it grows on.

After plain water, which drink is the most widely consumed in the world?

Tea of every colour, black, green or oolong, comes from the leaves of one shrub, Camellia sinensis; the difference is only in how long the picked leaves are left to darken before drying.

Which people were drinking bitter, spiced chocolate long before anyone in Europe had tasted it?

The Aztecs drank cacao bitter and spiced and used the beans as money; they had learned of it from the Maya, and Europeans only tasted chocolate after Spaniards carried it home in the 1500s.

Root beer gets its traditional flavour from the root bark of which tree?

Sassafras root bark gave root beer its original flavour, but its oil, safrole, was banned from American food in 1960, so most root beers now use artificial or safrole-free flavouring.

Bubble tea, with its chewy tapioca pearls, was invented in the 1980s in which place?

Taiwan: tea shops in Taichung and Tainan both claim to have invented it, and their ten-year court battle ended in 2019 with a ruling that it did not matter, because nobody can own the drink.

Coca-Cola was invented in the 1880s in Atlanta by John Pemberton, who worked as what?

John Pemberton was a pharmacist in Atlanta who first sold Coca-Cola in 1886 at the soda fountain of Jacobs' Pharmacy, marketing it as a tonic for headaches and tiredness.

Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s in which Texas city?

Waco: Charles Alderton mixed the drink at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola appeared, and early fans ordered it at the soda fountain by asking for 'a Waco'.

Edwin Perkins turned his bottled Fruit Smack into which powdered drink mix in 1927 so it would be cheaper to post?

Kool-Aid was born in Hastings, Nebraska, where Perkins worked out in his mother's kitchen how to take the water out of his syrup; the state later made it Nebraska's official soft drink.

Lassi, a smoothie-like drink from Punjab in India, is made mainly from what?

Yogurt is whisked with water into lassi, then salted and spiced or sweetened with fruit; it is traditionally served in a kulhar, an unglazed clay cup made to be thrown away after one use.

Slurpee frozen drinks are sold by which chain of stores?

7-Eleven licensed slush machines from the Icee company in 1965 and sold the drink under its own Slurpee name, chosen for the sound it makes through a straw.

Capri-Sun pouches first went on sale in 1969 as 'Capri-Sonne' in which country?

Germany: Rudolf Wild named the drink after the Italian holiday island of Capri, and German shoppers knew it as Capri-Sonne until the company switched to the English name in 2017.

Most coconut water sold as a drink is tapped from which kind of coconut?

Young green coconuts are the ones picked for drinking; a ripe brown nut still holds a little liquid, but by then much of it has gone into building the white flesh.

Which fizzy drink did Toronto's John McLaughlin first sell as Canada Dry in the early 1900s?

Ginger ale: the popular style of the day was dark and syrupy, so McLaughlin spent over a decade experimenting before he launched his paler, less sugary version in 1904.

Milkshakes became really popular in America after which kitchen gadget was invented?

The electric blender arrived in 1922, when Stephen Poplawski put a spinning blade in the bottom of a cup; before that a milkshake was shaken by hand, and afterwards it turned whipped and frothy.

Calamari, often served as crispy fried rings, comes from which sea creature?

Squid: the rings are slices cut across its hollow, tube-shaped body, and the name calamari goes back to a Latin word for a pen case or ink pot, probably after the dark ink a squid squirts.

A popular story says the pretzel's twisted shape was first meant to look like what?

Two hands praying: in one telling, an Italian monk around 610 AD twisted dough to look like arms crossed in prayer and gave the bakes to children as 'pretiola', little rewards, for learning their prayers.

Jelly beans became a traditional candy of which US holiday in the 1930s?

Easter: their egg-like shape tied jelly beans to Easter baskets in the 1930s. Ronald Reagan passed a jar around at his meetings and, as president, had them flown on the space shuttle in 1983.

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a vendor made a famous ice cream holder by curling up what?

A waffle cookie: in the best-known story, Ernest Hamwi was selling zalabia, a crisp Syrian waffle, beside an ice cream seller who ran short of serving dishes, so he rolled one into a cone; he later founded his own cone company.

Fortune cookies were probably first served in the US at a tea garden in which city?

San Francisco: Makoto Hagiwara, who ran the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, served them in the early 1900s. Until about World War II they were called 'fortune tea cakes', a clue to their Japanese roots.

About how many fortune cookies are made around the world every year?

About 3 billion a year, most of them eaten in the United States. The cookies did not come from China: the biggest maker opened a factory there in 1992 and soon gave up, its vice-president calling them 'too American'.

Which scientist promoted over a hundred uses for peanuts but is wrongly credited with inventing peanut butter?

George Washington Carver published his famous peanut bulletin in 1916, but a Canadian, Marcellus Edson, had patented peanut paste back in 1884, and John Harvey Kellogg patented his own version in the 1890s.

The nut we eat hangs off the bottom of a juicy, pear-shaped 'apple' on which tree?

Cashew nuts hang below the juicy cashew apple, and you never see them sold in their shells because the shell holds a caustic oil related to the irritant in poison ivy.

Frank Epperson said he invented which frozen treat at age 11 by leaving a drink outside overnight?

Popsicle: the stirring stick he had left in the drink froze in place and made a handle. He first called it the Epsicle, a blend of his own name and icicle.

When Cheerios cereal launched in 1941, it was sold under what name?

Cheerioats was the 1941 name; rival Quaker Oats complained that 'oats' was its trademark, so General Mills shortened it to Cheerios in 1945.

Ruth Wakefield is credited with inventing which treat in the 1930s at her Toll House Inn?

Chocolate chip cookies caught on so quickly that Nestlé won the right to use her recipe, for a price that Wakefield herself put at a single dollar.

Legend says pizza Margherita's red, white and green toppings were chosen to match what?

The Italian flag: the story goes that Naples pizza maker Raffaele Esposito served it to Queen Margherita in 1889, with tomato, mozzarella and basil standing in for the three colours.

Haribo's first gummy bear, made in 1922, was inspired by what?

Dancing bears at fairs and street festivals were a familiar sight in Europe, so Hans Riegel called his 1922 sweet the Dancing Bear; his wife Gertrud delivered each day's batch by bicycle.

The candy name PEZ is short for the German word for which flavour?

Peppermint: PEZ takes its letters from Pfefferminz, the German word for it. The sweets began in Vienna in 1927 as plain mints sold in little tins; toy heads on the dispensers only arrived in the 1950s, to win over children.

In 1958, Momofuku Ando of Nissin Foods launched which brand-new kind of food?

Instant noodles: Ando spent a year experimenting in a shed behind his house before finding that flash-frying cooked noodles in hot oil dried them so they were ready again in minutes; he called them Chikin Ramen.

Before 1959, the fuzzy brown kiwifruit was usually sold under what name?

Chinese gooseberry was the usual name until the word 'gooseberry' raised plant-health worries in America, and an importer there asked New Zealand exporter Turners & Growers for a new one.

Why is the durian fruit banned on public transport in Singapore?

Its very strong smell: fans find it sweet, others unbearable, and because the odour can hang around for days, hotels and trains across Southeast Asia ban the fruit.

Bright pink dragon fruit grows on what kind of plant?

A cactus: dragon fruit grows on a scrambling cactus from the American tropics whose huge white flowers open for a single night, when bats and moths come to pollinate them.

Which fruit, the biggest that grows on a tree, can weigh more than 40 kg?

Jackfruit, native to India, is the largest fruit borne by any tree, and each one is really hundreds of tiny flowers fused around a central core, which is why it pulls apart into so many fleshy bulbs.

Which usual chocolate ingredient is left out of white chocolate?

The cocoa solids, the dark part of the bean, are left out; white chocolate uses only the pale cocoa butter plus sugar and milk, which is why some people argue it isn't really chocolate at all.

Daniel Peter invented milk chocolate in the 1870s in which country?

Switzerland: in Vevey, Daniel Peter spent years trying to blend milk into chocolate and finally managed it with help from his neighbour Henri Nestlé, a baby-food maker who knew how to take the water out of milk.

The inventor of Goldfish crackers made them fish-shaped in 1958 because his wife had which star sign?

Pisces, the sign of the fish: baker Oscar Kambly made the crackers for his wife, and Pepperidge Farm's founder Margaret Rudkin brought them to America in 1962 after trying them on a trip to Europe.

The prized mozzarella of Italy's Campania region is traditionally made from which animal's milk?

Water buffalo milk, much richer in fat than cow's milk, makes mozzarella di bufala; the name comes from 'mozzare', to cut off, after the way each ball is pinched from the stretched curd.

Otto Rohwedder's machine let a Missouri bakery first sell which food in 1928?

Sliced bread from the Chillicothe Baking Company caught on so widely that later inventions were measured against it, which gave us 'the greatest thing since sliced bread'.

Which dessert is named after a Russian ballerina?

Pavlova, a crisp meringue shell with a soft centre topped with cream and fruit, honours ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured Australia and New Zealand in 1926; both countries claim to have invented it.

Saffron, the world's priciest spice, is picked from which flower?

The crocus: saffron is the three red stigmas of Crocus sativus, picked by hand each autumn, so it takes roughly 150,000 flowers to make one kilogram.

The Scoville scale rates chili peppers by how much they what?

Burn your mouth: Wilbur Scoville's 1912 test had tasters sip ever weaker dilutions of pepper extract until the heat vanished. Bell peppers score zero, while Pepper X, named the world's hottest in 2023, averages over 2.6 million units.

Brussels sprouts take their name from the capital city of which country?

Belgium: sprouts may have been grown around Brussels as early as the 1200s. Gardeners like to wait for a frost before picking them, because that is when they are said to taste sweetest.

Goulash, a meat stew first cooked by cattle herders, comes from which country?

Hungary: gulyás means 'herdsman', and the herders' kettle stew had no paprika at first, because the peppers that turn it red only reached Europe from the Americas in the 1500s.

The first nachos, in 1943, were tortilla chips with cheese and which pickled pepper?

Jalapeño: Ignacio 'Nacho' Anaya, head waiter at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, could not find the cook, so he topped fried tortilla pieces with cheese and sliced pickled jalapeños himself for a table of hungry customers.

Which nut gives Nutella spread its flavour, along with cocoa?

Hazelnut: after World War II cocoa was scarce and costly in Italy, so baker Pietro Ferrero stretched it with the hazelnuts that grow all around his home town of Alba.

Potato chips were long called 'Saratoga Chips' after a spa town in which US state?

New York: Saratoga Springs was a fashionable spa town. A famous tale says cook George Crum invented them there in 1853 to annoy a fussy customer, but historians have shown the story is a myth.

Baskin-Robbins promised 31 ice cream flavours so you could try a new one every what?

Day of the month: 31 flavours meant a different one for every day, an idea the chain adopted in 1953. Founders Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins, who were brothers-in-law, settled whose name came first with a coin toss.

Ben & Jerry's opened its first ice cream parlour in 1978 inside a renovated what?

Gas station: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, after learning the trade from a Penn State correspondence course; they had first planned to open a bagel shop.

Which candy's foil wrapper has had a paper strip called a 'plume' poking out of the top since 1921?

Hershey's Kisses were wrapped by hand from 1907 with the brand name hidden inside the foil; when machines took over in 1921, the plume was added so shoppers could tell a real one from its copycats.

Hydrox cookies came out in 1908, but which sandwich cookie copied them four years later?

Oreo arrived in 1912 as an imitation of Hydrox, then outsold the original so thoroughly that many people now assume Hydrox is the copy.

The Spanish word 'tortilla' translates roughly as what?

Little cake: tortilla is the diminutive of torta, Spanish for cake, a name Spanish conquerors gave the flat maize breads they found in the Americas; in Spain itself the word means an omelette.

Which spice is the dried, unopened flower bud of a tropical evergreen tree?

Clove buds are picked before they open and dried into hard brown spikes; the name comes from 'clou', the French word for nail, because that is just what one looks like.

Cocoa pods, which chocolate is made from, sprout straight out of which part of the tree?

The trunk: cacao trees flower straight from the trunk and thick branches, a habit called cauliflory, which makes hand-harvesting easier for pickers using a knife on a long pole.

In Greek myth, Persephone had to return to the underworld each year after eating the seeds of which fruit?

Pomegranate: because Persephone tasted its seeds in the land of the dead, the myth says she must go back for part of every year, and while she is away her mother Demeter lets the earth turn barren.

Black peppercorns are the dried fruit of what kind of plant?

A climbing vine: Piper nigrum climbs trees or poles in hot, wet climates like India's Malabar coast. The fruits are picked green and dried until they wrinkle and turn black; white pepper has the skin removed.

The spice mace is the lacy red covering of which other spice's seed?

Nutmeg: its seed comes wrapped in the red aril we dry as mace. The spice was once so prized that a 1667 peace treaty left the English holding Manhattan while the Dutch kept Run, a tiny nutmeg island in Indonesia.

In Britain, Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday, the last day before which season starts?

Lent: pancakes were a tasty way to use up eggs, milk and butter before the 40 days of fasting that begin on Ash Wednesday. Olney in Buckinghamshire holds a famous pancake race said to date back to 1445.

Decorated gingerbread houses became popular after which fairy tale was published?

Hansel and Gretel: once the Brothers Grimm published the tale in 1812, with its witch's house of bread, cake and sugar, decorated gingerbread houses caught on with German bakers, and German settlers took the custom to Pennsylvania.

In 1908, candy maker George Smith named his hard candy on a stick after what?

A racehorse named Lolly Pop inspired Smith, who trademarked the name in 1931, yet 'lollipop' had already been an English word for a sweet since the 1780s.

Before going in the oven, ring-shaped bagels are traditionally dunked in what?

Boiling water sets the outside of the dough before it goes in the oven, which is what gives a bagel its dense, chewy bite; Montreal bakers sweeten the water with honey.